Top 50 Songs

Still, the challenge lay beckoning me like some kind of distant lighthouse beam promising to navigate me to shore if only I would begin the journey.

How exactly then, does a person go about the task of reducing more than four decades of dedicated music listening to an atom-sized list of just 50 favourite songs?

With great difficulty, as it turns out.

A number of the artists featured in this countdown could easily have provided 50 songs on their own. And what of the sheer brutality required to leave out classics from my distant youth such as “Video killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, “Heart of Glass” by Blondie and “The Look” by Roxette?

In the end, with the aid of enough teeth-clenching to render me with the overbite of a prairie dog, I somehow managed to settle on my almost (but probably not entirely) definitive Top 50 Songs list. This goldfish-bowl look into the uplifting earworms and joyous anthems I have had running through my head these so many years includes songs from each decade from the 60’s through to the present.

My face may well be brightened with my own sense of achievement at having compiled this catalogue, but in its aftermath, after having reached the end point of such a herculeanly large undertaking, I am, for the moment at least, a creatively spent force. And therefore, by my own reckoning, a momentarily emptied, somewhat genuinely tragic figure.

I’m not kidding!

Thus, before this introduction gets any weirder or more melodramatic, I say … bring on the music!